‘Thanks,’ voxed Thule, turning into another engagement.
‘Laquell! Heads up!’ called Larice, ‘You got one on your high six!’
Cannon shells spat from a Hell Blade’s guns, a couple raking the topside armour of the Thunderbolt. Larice saw it was armed with underslung rockets too.
‘Damn! Bad guy on my tail! Schaw, get him off me!’
‘I’m on it,’ replied his wingman.
The rear of Laquell’s Thunderbolt spat brightly burning flares in an attempt to prevent the enemy rocket from locking onto his engine emissions. He threw the plane into a series of wild manoeuvres to try and shake his pursuer.
‘Damn, this guy’s good!’ swore Laquell as the bat matched him move for move.
‘Rocket away!’ shouted Schaw.
‘Breaking left!’ answered Laquell, rolling hard and down.
‘Come on...’ prayed Larice, kicking in the afterburner and diving hard. She felt her vision greying under the pressure of the increased g-forces. Her flight suit expanded and she felt the composition of her air-mix change as she pushed the craft to the edge of the envelope.
She mashed the cannon trigger and filled the air behind Laquell’s plane with las-fire.
The missile detonated prematurely as one of Larice’s shots clipped its warhead. She felt the shockwave of its detonation and laughed in relief.
Laquell spun his plane round in a screaming turn and chopped the throttle, almost stalling the craft. The pilot of the Hell Blade tried to stay with him, but the explosion had concealed Laquell’s survival, and its pilot couldn’t match the Thunderbolt’s turn.
The cocky pilot of the 235th rolled inverted and pulled in behind the red aircraft, slotting it neatly between his gunsights. Quad-fire banged from the nose guns, shredding the bat’s tailpipe and blowing the aircraft apart in a spectacular orange fireball.
Laquell hollered his triumph over the vox and flew over the debris.
Larice checked the auspex and saw the remaining five bombers had broken through the fighter cordon and were heading towards the civilian areas of Coriana. A screen of twelve bats lingered in their wash, ready to turn on any pursuit.
‘Apostle Five in pursuit,’ said Larice. ‘Who’s with me?’
‘Apostle Lead,’ said Seekan.
‘Indigo Lead,’ replied Laquell.
‘Apostle Nine,’ said Ziner Krone.
‘Apostle Six,’ said Saul Cirksen.
‘Indigo Two,’ said Schaw.
‘Rise to Angels minus five hundred and dive on burners,’ ordered Seekan, asserting his natural authority over this ad hoc squadron. A flight’s destination altitude was never given in the open, and ‘Angels’ was a set altitude that changed every day. In this case it had been set at a thousand metres.
The Thunderbolts, a mix of camo-green and cream, snapped up in a sharp climb before aiming their guns down upon the bats.
‘Turn and burn,’ ordered Seekan.
Larice hit her afterburners, closing the distance to the bombers and their escort in a matter of moments. The bats broke into a combat spread and the Thunderbolts slashed through their formation. Larice tagged one plane, shearing its left wing off with her quads. It tumbled end over end into the ground, and ploughed a fiery gouge through a maze of pipework extending from an aluminium-skinned structure.
Laquell splashed another and each of the Apostles claimed a kill before they vectored back into the fight. Now it was one on one, and Larice shot her quads at a crimson Hell Talon with bloody teeth painted on its swept wings. The Talon threw itself into a low dive, sweeping under an aqueduct of pipes, and Larice followed him down. The bat slashed through the air, jinking past flame-topped towers, around vast, portal-framed fabriks and between enormous cylindrical ore-silos.
Larice kept to her quads, loosing a sharp burst every time she got weapons lock, but the bat was good. He kept her at arm’s length, always anticipating her deflections and viffing out of the way in time.
‘Stand still, frig you,’ she hissed, deploying air brakes and vectoring right to sidestep around the tall lifter derricks of a Leman Russ assembly yard. Swaying pallets of building materials flashed past her canopy and she caught the terrified ‘O’ of the derrick’s crewman, passing within a metre of her wingtip. The bat spun around a blazing plume of venting gases from a promethium refinery and a host of las-bolts exploded around her. She felt the hammer blows on her fuselage and jinked down.
Whip aerials on the roof of a manufactory snapped off on her underside and she snagged a trailing cord from a Mechanicus banner. It burned up in her heat bloom, and Larice couldn’t decide what kind of omen that was. The bat arced past her canopy, and she stood her plane on its end, rolling inverted and hitting the burners again to get on its tail.
The gases from the refinery surged in her jetwash and punched her after the bat like she’d been launched from the rails with her rocket assist. The acceleration slammed her back in her seat, but seconds later she was right on the bat’s tail. Larice cut her burners and mashed the firing trigger. A stream of autocannon shells ripped into the bat’s engines and sliced through its entire length. Literally sawn in two, the shorn halves of the bat fell out of the sky in flames.
Larice pulled up, hearing triumphant shouts from the other pilots as they splashed their targets. Only Schaw failed to take down his bat, misjudging a turn and ending up with a bat on his tail instead. Seekan shot down the bat, and the Imperial planes roared after the rising bombers as they started their attack runs.
Too slow to evade the Imperial pursuit, the Tormentors unloaded their bombs early and aimed their aircraft towards the ground. Each one ploughed into the tangle of pipes, bridges and construction yards of Coriana’s industrial hinterland, leaving a trail of devastation hundreds of metres long. Fires raged in the swathes of burning jet fuel wreckage, and Larice pulled up through banks of shimmering thermals and buffeting winds of exploding ordnance.
It wasn’t pretty, but looking towards the untouched hab-stacks, residential sprawls and commercia districts, she knew it could have been a lot worse.
Two more attacks came in over the mountains, again with little warning until they’d crossed the Breakers, and the Apostles flew round-the-clock sorties with the regrouped diaspora of aircraft from the forward airbases. It was brutal flying, the Archenemy planes battering at the gates of Coriana as though it were the ultimate prize in the war.
Larice supposed it was, looking up at the map pinned to the wall of the market hall. The air carried the taste of spoiled fruit and dairy products, of decay and abandonment. She sat on a camp chair with her booted feet resting on a packing crate that had once contained Mark V magazines for lasguns.
Pilots on the rotation hustled back and forth between mission briefings and Munitorum supply depots where cold caffeine and hot food were on offer. The abandoned market hall now served as a makeshift Operations centre. At the far end of the vaulted, echoing chamber, a heaving mass of cogitators and logic engines were hooked up to a series of coughing generators. A gaggle of uniformed officers and tech-priests surrounded an illuminated plotting table. It bathed their faces in a bleaching light, and a fug of incense hung over their deliberations. Runners sped back and forth, updating senior flight officers on developments over the Ice, and commands were barked into vox-horns to scramble this flight, divert that flight or assist another. One particular flight officer, a fat man in a voluminous robe, seemed to be the centre of attention, and Larice wondered how he’d ever managed to fit in the cockpit of an aircraft.